Demystifying Poverty: Socialism and Capitalism.

i'm gonna begin this live stream by
reading a letter i received from a supporter on patreon and i'll return to answering this question after just addressing another more broad more general also sent in to me through patreon hannibal writes in and says quote hi isil i am interested in learning more about why some nations succeed and why others fail i have read guns germans and steel and why nations fail these are the titles of two separate books and i'm already halfway through an economics 101 textbook by gregory menkeu the author i don't know in this particular case continue my quotation quote but i want to learn more about this and i was wondering if you could offer some guidance to be more specific i am indian and i'm very interested in learning why my own country is such a wreck as opposed to japan or the u.s which are incredibly well-developed nations this is a very meaningful question that's why i'm making this live stream now i'm happy to answer it however even built into the first sentence there are incredibly complex assumptions now an assumption is neither right nor wrong the problem is that you bring an assumption into an argument into a discussion without fully understanding it yourself right right or wrong an assumption is going to be a problem if it's not really disclosed to you the idea of what it means for a nation to succeed and what it means for a nation to fail and in what sense india is a self-evident failure and japan a self-evident success is nothing self-evident or simple about these things now i am not trivializing the question i'm just saying that there are really a lot of things to to examine now the questions i'm going to deal with in this video this one and then the next one i'm going to read you just a moment here they are questions i've addressed on the channel before and you know there's a kind of sense in which philosophically the answers i have to give today uh are not different from the answers i've given the past like on some profound deep level the same answer but there are a lot of ways in which up on the shallow surface the answers i have to give today are are very different sure of course melissa looks surprised melissa did a bunch of videos lately on the so-called black hammer organization um the discourse about socialism the discourse about capitalism the discourse about communism it's profoundly different in late 2021 than it was in early 2020 to use you know we've lived through the rise and fall of bernie sanders we've lived through the rise and fall of a kind of self-defeating social justice movement in the united states of america uh tearing down statues calling for the abolition of the police so on and so forth we've lived through these big profound changes and there's a subtle long-term change in our thinking brought about by joe biden fundamentally ending the strategic alliance through the united states and china some that lasted from 1971 until the end of the uh donald trump era or whether you put the end of alliance during donald trump or it really only ends explicitly when when joe biden says it's over forever and and now it's over so we're probably moving into a new epoch of looking at and addressing the communist threat frankly in a way we never did before in a way we didn't what we haven't done since 1971 put it that way so you know the emergence of of china as america's great enemy now i'm recording this on monday august 16th china is gloating about america's military defeat in afghanistan china is openly saying that they are going to support and make peace with the taliban and have positive relations with the new governments taking over afghanistan now this is irrelevant in some ways to the topics we're discussing here but it illustrates the extent to which china now has the attitude that they will they will support anyone who's anti-american and that they will you know even if it is not in china's long-term self-interest to support a muslim fundamentalist regime in afghanistan obviously this is not it's not in china's interest it's not the interest of communism or anything else um nevertheless they'll do it just to just despite the americans and obviously right now under vladimir vladimir putin russia has a similar zero-sum attitude that's no i'm let's not say that russia has a similarly malignant attitude zero sum is is an overused term show it to everyone in the audience um so the second question that i'm going to in fact address first um comes in from a supporter on patreon who just asked simply what is socialism he says simply that he hears it all the time but doesn't really know what it means so i saw that question i saw a few other people react to it and then i posted in patreon saying look i can make a new live stream talking about this although it is a topic of addressed in the past and again i mean if you did it every five years you know why is the question being asked what is the significance of the answer there are a lot of things that have changed obviously the most fundamental definition of what socialism is and isn't hasn't changed but why does it matter why are we why are we asking the question now and what are we going to make the answer no so the last time i discussed this it mattered because of bernie sanders and i think it's fair to say bernie sanders is now relegated to a footnote in history no offense um but that that came and went and there was a great re-evaluation of of the meaning of the word socialism and i kind of had to put my foot down and say look this is what socialism means and this is what it doesn't in that context because in many ways the supporters of bernie sanders themselves were being strategically vague as to as to what bernie sanders himself meant in calling himself a socialist and then what it meant for his followers the people who was recruiting many of whom many of whom were really communists really had an anti-capitalist agenda as they would say themselves whether or not they'd use the term communists so you know in understanding socialism in the 21st century the easiest way to explain it is through military dictatorship now as soon as i say that some people in the audience might assume i am some kind of right-wing pro-capitalist libertarian or animal capitalist i am none of those things there was a time when our idea of what the military meant was quite a bit more complex look into how the military operated in the 10th century or the 15th century there was nothing socialist about it the way the military operates in any modern western democracy in the 21st century is as a socialist economy within a capitalist economy taxpayers dollars are gathered and they create a military academy they create a miniature society on each military base where the presence and significance of money is largely symbolic so this is a little bit different from one country to the next you know america versus the british army versus the german army or or what have you but very often on the military base all of the food men to men need to eat is provided for free by the army ultimate by the taxpayers but then above and beyond that if they want to buy candy bars or beer there's some kind of recreational items they they can pay for these things also there's the cash kind of stuff they'll often have a barber shop and this differs from country to country is it free to get a haircut or do you have a haircut but in reality the barber the guy working in the barbershop he is himself also in the army he's not private sector the army has educational programs those have whole universities and whole colleges different countries without training within the base some extent the education system is completely socialist it will have and this is maybe the most significant example of all they have a medical system right they have doctors they have surgeons every stage of medical care has to be provided by the army and this is the point many people say that the united states of america has a free market health care system that has a capitalist private for profit health care system not the army within the military healthcare is socialist and if you google it many of the distinct features of socialism that's both its critics and its supporters will attribute to the concept are demonstrated by medical care as provided within the us army now i already gave the disclaimer i'm not right-wing i'm i'm not a libertarian i'm not an aero capitalist in in this political sense i'd never describe myself as even being kind of pro free market you just kind of have to understand what the free market is and what it isn't what it's good at and what it's not so good at what its strengths and and weaknesses are and obviously it would be completely ridiculous to have a military base and say oh well let's get rid of all this socialism let's just let the soldiers go and buy their own lunch let's just let mcdonald's and restaurants and let a private let let local civilians set up a vegetable market and they can buy their own vegetables oh let's let's let them get their own haircuts they can cut each other's hair uh let a private barber shop you know show up and do these things oh why do why do we need to provide them with with health care why do we need to run them with surgeons and doctors when when soldiers get shot just let the free market handle it just let them go out like let them get out their wallets and go and you know really serious like if you're a serious animal gatherer say oh well we can just give them a rebate like the amount of money we're saving by not charging the taxpayers to provide medical care we'll give them more cash we'll give them a higher salary and say look from now on you handle your own medical insurance you handle your own paying for your medical services go go and find your own doctor in the private sector it could never it could never possibly work i'll get into some other situations where socialism is either vastly more efficient or it is really the only option in terms of just organizing people living together in high density in a particular place so i don't say these things because um i'm i'm opposed in this sense to military modes of organization um when you contrast the free market private sector of medicine so we're going to say the united states here but this is true of cambodia it's true many many countries we have a significant role for the free market there's really nowhere in the world that has a true free market for medical services the government is always involved to some extent but you know when you're looking at the contrast between private sector and and uh socialist uh medical services okay one of the most striking things is to compare the military to the the free market uh provision of surgery surgeons are paid dramatically less in the military system right now if you went to medical school through the military so if you learned to be a doctor going to a military college the cost of your tuition was also less so you see this is already this is the pattern of socialism right lower tuition lower salary i think you could probably all say longer working hours maybe i think i think you work pretty long hours as a military surgeon maybe i'm wrong let's assume the same the same the same hours okay so and um uh the services are provided in a way that is centrally planned now okay a lot of this sounds scary okay what does that mean well there will be some military bases that only have 50 guys some remote military base uh in alaska or something they're only they're only a few guys there keeping a radar array going and a place for helicopters and airplanes there are 50 guys on a military base but guess what you have to have sufficient medical staff there all the time to deal with an emergency and you may have they may do they may do nothing for 300 days a year there may be guys who are being paid by the military like the same salary as someone at a busy base but they're the medical team just to sit on that base and deal with emergencies at this this smaller place that's a centrally made decision now if you're a right-wing libertarian or another capitalist you say this is inefficiency it's also robustness right so in economic terminology yes to have a medical doctor sitting and doing nothing at an army base for 300 days a year just for the few days a year when there is a medical emergency right that is economically inefficient but it's also economically robust right you're prepared so now what does robustness mean in this kind of context this is a great example frankly okay what if you take the opposite strategy this could be again canada the united states any large country the lord and frankly even greece you could talk about this all kinds of countries where you have to have guys stationed okay well what if you decide to save money as a government making the central plains and you say okay we're going to cancel the deployment of those doctors and nurses and again for this base maybe it's one doctor and one nurse i don't know so they don't have medical staff ready to go all the time we're gonna we're gonna cancel that and you know what if there's a medical emergency up at this remote base we're just gonna be prepared to send in helicopters with emergency medical staff like as soon as possible okay so if that happens twice a year look at the actual cost right like you thought it was a cost savings to only to only send in you know medical teams when there was an emergency but the cost of in an emergency deploying someone where they get there in alaska and the nearest base is uh with a with a large medical team is out in the aleutian islands or something okay so you're sending people a long distance as fast as possible you know kind of with danger pay and stuff the actual cost to you the cost in jet fuel the cost of doing this every time there's an emergency is greater and guess what there's also going to be a cost in human lives sometimes people are going to die who could have lived who could have survived if there had been uh medical teams there and the cost of their injuries like people who don't die but they have a more serious injury it takes more time more care etc etc right the actual medical costs are greater because you didn't have someone on staff so this is this idea of of robustness i used to have one right-wing libertarian fan of the channel mod vegan she kept her cards close to her chest but she was really a crazy right-wing anarcho-capitalist libertarian type person that's who she really was guys and shortly after we had our one debate that really revealed what a right-wing nutcase she was she closed down her youtube channel coincidence [Laughter] um but you know i gave the example this is this is many years ago on the channel of how robustness works that if you're running a hospital you may want to pay some staff to stand around and do nothing and those guys they're not specialists they're not absurd they're not like a heart surgeon they're not a nutritionist they're not an electrician they're not a janitor but you have people standing around ready to help even though they're not good at any one particular job because when there suddenly is an emergency when suddenly you have 50 patients show up all at once you need people who can just move things around and follow orders and help out oh look i need you to take this bed like this gurney as we said bed on wheels and take it over the other place and if you don't have a staff standing around doing nothing then the people you ask to do that they are specialists they are people who could be doing something else instead who could be doing a more important job so this is an example of robustness and economic theory that yes so anyone someone some some economist can show up at this hospital and say oh well look you're paying five guys to stand around and do nothing and you have to have someone church it that's right these guys today they're doing nothing and maybe even 300 days a year doing nothing but guess what there are times when we really need them and if we didn't have those guys these would be the consequences of suddenly higher costs and so on and again in that case if you don't have excess staff on hand maybe you have higher costs even just in terms of you make a phone call and you say to people look we're going to pay you double overtime but we need you to come in and help us out you know we have we have extraordinary needs so efficiency is one measure of robustness okay now i said before if you look at the military system of um [Music] medical care and it has a linked system of education has been alluded to and so on it has both the advantages and the disadvantages of socialism right i mentioned salaries are much lower economic efficiency is much lower right total cost is always surprisingly shockingly high so this is a pattern in socialism and it's a pattern because of human nature um so again i don't vilify this i really don't but a case study i mean it's pretty well documented but canadians are still really uncomfortable talking about it was that we had attempts again and again to have the government here run railroads we'd attempts again again to have the government run gas stations and in every case whether you compared the railroad the the government railroad to the private sector railroad operating at the same time or if you compared it after privatization so it's the same railroad under government socialist management and under private company management amazingly everything got cheaper everything became cheaper everything like you know and not slightly cheaper like dramatically cheaper the kind of efficiency that's achieved by amazon.com would not be achieved by a government service now unfortunately i mean to get a really kind of down-to-earth honest discussion of this that isn't from someone who's either a left-winger making excuses for socialism or a right winger trying to you know offer an indictment of it is is very difficult but you know when you when you get into details it's it's interesting and you know it may not seem like it takes a lot of genius pardon me to run a chain of gas stations efficiently but guess what the government of canada completely lacks that kind of genius you know whatever the managerial talent is and the willingness to make those uh tough choices and to reorganize and so on and the private sector you know of course the private sector is not flawless companies go bankrupt companies fail you know you have two companies competing against each other and one is doing everything right and the other is doing everything wrong lots of examples of this it's not that the free market is inerrant but one of the interesting patterns you see play out again and again is this sort of unbelievable inefficiency uh in the social system now you know i am going to give my biased comment on this but i'm going to disclaim this is not a sort of complete encyclopedic discussion of why uh social assistance are so much so much more efficient but i'm going to i'm going to highlight one important aspect it's important to me and probably for you guys uh in the audience and support you too shout out to lydia i was one i was wondering what happened to what happened she said she's been studying for exams at med school all right welcome back to the welcome back to the cult all right so you know lydia is in university studying to be a med school student most of us have some experience with an authoritarian university you know climate being in the context of a university if the university is wasting money who can question it if you are a student and you raise the question right the professors say to you who the hell do you think you are how dare your question is and they have power to shut you up and silence you right now i used to be married to a professor i've also been personal friends with professors if a professor questions in you might be surprised to learn that they are pretty effectively silenced and shut up in the same way they're told who the hell do you think you are even if they go to a board meeting and try to present something so on and so forth and here's the other thing you if you haven't been inside a university you might not be able to visualize this even if the most senior executive at the top of the university so he may have a title like the president of the university if he points his finger and says hey this is wasteful this is inefficient we need to rethink this you would be amazed at how good socialist systems are at closing ranks against the people up top and one way or another obfuscating delaying shutting down becoming intransigent resisting reform right where where nothing changes or where something very slight symbolically changes like somebody was oh yeah we got your point about how we're wasting money and how we should fire people oh that's a really good point we're going to give it to the committee and we're going to talk to the union and we're going to let you know and you know they can they can say anything back but to a remarkable extent you know the change doesn't happen even when orders come from the top so i just say um just appealing to uh lydia being in university if you've been in the military i was talking to a guy the other day about being in the canadian military you know the kind of inefficiency that goes on and on forever for many years or for decades and again this is what happened within canadian public sector railway service then so on and so forth uh and it can happen within the medical service um could could it be different in japanese culture just to give an example like the generalizations i've just made about humor it could be but it's not i mean a culture as different from ours as japan oh i'm getting out of focus some reason um a culture as different as japan is from the united states and canada remarkably reproduces the same patterns of behavior so you know we can't generalize too much we need there have been experience with socialism in africa there have been experiments in socialism in in latin america and it's remarkable how common these patterns are and indeed um [Music] how different is it to be inside university bureaucracy in japan as opposed to the united states of america canada how different is it really to work inside a hospital in japan it's interesting how the same patterns of authoritarianism frankly play out again again okay good good question from freda all right so frida says most socialist systems become dictatorships so what i'm suggesting to you is is different in a subtle and important way what i'm saying is that socialist systems definitionally are micro graph scripts let's get serious what i'm saying to you is by definition most socialist systems are militant okay okay most socialist system no i'm not even saying most all socialist systems are by definition miniature military dictatorships the question is what kind of larger democratic society are they a part of and what kind of power suasion transparency surveillance inspection does that larger democracy impose upon that miniature military dictatorship i was merging miniature and military into one word it was like miniature military today that was what was happening there when i was speaking so you know now look when you say that i've warned repeat look i'm not right wing i'm not libertarian i'm really not um in canada we have a lot of remote small islands we have small islands in the arctic we have small islands off the east coast of canada and there are a lot of situations where you can just look at this piece of rock in the ocean and the canadian government has some very good reason why we need to keep a couple hundred people living on this rock it may be something like maintaining a radar array it may be uh maybe fishing and maybe all kinds of things maybe you know military or strategic issues may have to do with trade maybe you want to have a port there that you can unload things at or something i don't know maybe maintaining a lighthouse this kind of thing there's some remote piece of rock and you look at this and you say well if you do this with the free market like it's not going to be inhabitable like this can't be inhabited at a profit this can't be run at a profit this remote community can't really have a grocery store operating at a profit it can't provide its own electricity at a profit it can't provide sewage and plumbing at a profit it can't provide medical care at a profit and the government of canada will end up one way or another running this whole little outpost this whole little village or community on a remote small island as a socialist society now uh look just say one thing's out one of the themes i wanted to talk about in this video is the extent to which propaganda kind of becomes reality through public education technically uh hong kong in the 1980s hong kong before it was taken over by the economy technically all of hong kong was a socialist economy there was no private property nobody owned land all land was over the government most people don't know this so everyone was renting from the government the government was everybody's landlord well but i mean whatever whether you say hong kong in the 1970s or 1980s whatever and by the way hong kong in that period in the british period they didn't have democracy they really didn't okay but they had pretty much all of the advantages of capitalism and democracy because people just pretended they were a capitalist democracy people lived their lives as if hong kong were a capitalist market the whole period 1960s 1970s 1980s now you know likewise if you have a small outpost in some small island of canada and the reality is there's one store that provides people with groceries and there's one doctor one uh one nurse or something then you have this kind of thing and it's all more or less controlled by the government or even by the military uh people there are nevertheless very likely to carry on having democratic attitudes you know they're likely to carry on having democratic capital that is living and treating one another in that same in that same way they are not going to treat each other the way citizens of saudi arabia treat each other a country that's never had democracy and isn't democracy so just point out all of these same issues like having a miniature military dictatorship within a larger society well that exists in saudi arabia also that exists in so-called communist china also right but the difference is the larger the larger society around it now am i an optimist about this no i'm tremendously pessimistic again i'll come back to universities um you know as worthwhile you know to what extent are universities in canada or the united states democratic well if anyone in a university says something that's really openly racist the mass media and press and public opinion pounce on the university and demand that they become more politically correct okay so this is one example where something like this kind of functions if anyone at the university system that is overly sexist overly dismissive or contemptuous towards women there's some capacity for the demos for the masses to exert their their pressure on this university for two of them the problem is that's about it that is about the limit that is about the extent of democracy on the university campus i would say the same thing about hospitals i think you guys can probably imagine we had a scandal a couple months ago in canada where somebody on some doctors and nurses said some vaguely racist things to a first nations woman who was dying and in all of the news coverage they didn't want to mention what she was dying of or why she was in the hospital or why these doctors and nurses had such a bad attitude towards her i'm not making excuses for it but this woman was lying on her deathbed dying and she recorded the doctors and nurses saying insulting things to her and probably it was probably racist to some extent but if not maybe those doctors and nurses say installing things to all kinds of people but yeah you know it's it raises to some extent um you know it's just just being a vulgarian to some extent i was just being a horrible person being a crass and sensitive person in a situation where you should have some more uh sensitivity but you know i know a lot of doctors is like that um okay and there was this mass outrage and the government of quebec swore they would solve this problem that they would eliminate racism within the hospital system what really changed afterwards okay well you can compare this to communist china you can compare this to saudi arabia there are other countries where these little circles these little miniature societies military dictatorship do not even have this level of public oversight public interest of democratic invigilation where they aren't swept along with a larger uh culture of democracy so again you know no big deal but even though um there is no democracy whatsoever within american military bases culturally there's a lot of democracy and you know the fact is that those guys when they're on holiday or just if they have a weekend where they're going down they go and they live in a democracy they carry with them attitudes uh that make life tolerable within that within that military base and that's you know and a lot of these things that's that's the best you can help okay i'm just going to take a moment to um uh to look at these comments thanks everyone for writing in if you guys want to you can hit the thumbs up button it'll help some more people discover the live stream it is no big deal either way i'm doing this i'm doing this live stream partly to wake myself up i'm still writing and rewriting my book might i might take a few more months before i publish the book we'll see but i've got uh i've got more to say i've got more to say on paper and and here and sometimes i get on camera and say okay i'll answer some questions from the audience um trying to sharpen myself up before in the book i'm also i'm also quitting caffeine again not for the first time last time i am almost at zero caffeine i've got to say yep i've been drinking only decaf i had i had decaf coffee today and decaf coffee yesterday but let me tell you something decaf coffee has more than zero caffeine and it really does um all right so here's a useful comment that i'm going to disagree with from anonymous 101 anonymous 101 says in a free market changes can happen faster while in a more centrally pardon me while in a more centralized planned economy you've made a mistake in the writing and sense he says can't become of the bureaucracy so i'm sorry you i i get what you're saying but you messed up your sentence you're 100 wrong you're completely wrong if the government of communist china wants to build a train to tibet it happens now what happens immediately there have been several disasters in china in response to which they built new hospitals immediately with all of the efficiency of ordering the army to deploy centrally planned systems are much faster than the free market now you can imagine what would have happened with certain medical emergencies that happened within the last year and a half or two years if the government had just sat back and said well let's let the private sector take care of it we have all these wonderful doctors and nurses and hospitals and pharmaceutical companies let's just let them do whatever they think is best and work at their own pace no so you know one simple reason for that is leadership that when you have centralized planning you have leadership you have decisive leadership and another is just the nature of the budgeting right is that the government has a position to say do this now i don't care how much it costs or we'll we'll deal with the details of how much it costs later so no um there's you know uh in terms of making big changes fast the government wins every time uh now i'll give you another example what about uh solar power what about changing the way electricity is generated if you just think about if you say okay well let's just let small private companies go out and do their own thing okay what about a centralized government ordering something and making it who invented the internet when you actually go through the history pretty much the whole development of computer technology came about because the government specifically especially the us military made contracts and made orders and and demanded things and then yeah private private companies contracted out and created them but they say no a lot of that impetus in a lot of that direction actually it comes from from central planning whatever you want to call it oh so here's here's a similar reply from from 12 sat 12 says quote uh do not he or she does not defend china chinese authoritarianism but in some circumstances they can be more efficient for instance they can mandate new health policies so yeah i've just i've just said something very similar to what you said there are massive advantages to central planning in the short term so i look i could talk about this all day but you know uh to use a really complex example briefly the problem is that the advantages in the short term can blind you to the disadvantages in the long term right so you know all right stick with um solar power uh you could order the military literally the military to produce and install solar power cells across the country like not even contracting out you're gonna say okay we're gonna take the military corps of engineers we're gonna take a whole bunch of we're gonna take the sniper core like take guys whose job is normally shooting guns some totally unrelated french to military we're gonna take men with guns ask them to put their guns down and start installing thousands of solar panels that we're gonna produce and you can get it done very very quickly however there are people living in kansas the people living in wichita kansas there are people living in all these different places and after your mobilized army team has swept through town they're going to say well we don't have small businesses here with the know-how to repair and improve these things we don't have companies with a grid working that can collect this power and pay us for it there are kind of all these other organic elements of what would really make solar power work in any in any given place that rely a lot on the private sector and just on people having know-how and responsibility and so on now you know i would say many countries have had to make the decision about whether they want to develop telecommunications infrastructure now fast and have the government do it at a tremendous cost or have telecom telecommunications infrastructure develop more gradually with more private sector more decentralized and thus uneven uh innovation and there are advantages and disadvantages to both but yeah if you want it done today it's going to be socialism and it's going to resemble the military because again i just gave this example having the military install solar panels but if instead joe biden says well it's not going to be the military they're going to create a new department of the federal government they're going to wear a different uniform well it's still men in uniform being paid by the government and the service to to deploy it so yeah uh uh there are difficult questions about sort of law not even so much long-term inefficiencies but long-term lost opportunities and by having the government take that initiative you are crowding out um private sector uh individual innovative solutions that would have would have pressed in to some extent especially in a very large economy uh like the united states of america so those are those are tough decisions okay okay so uh this is way off topic but frida is just asking about chinese citizens who filmed uh uh police brutality and so on frida there's there's a whole demon for that and what can i tell you i mean it's it's a huge world i met someone who worked for a company they accompanied their charity and this company existed just to gather complaints about the chinese government during the brief time where they were on the internet before they disappeared and then to kind of chart or track the chinese government response to these things um you know the good news is that chinese censorship of that kind is often paired with a willingness to the part of the chinese government to go and solve the problem so it's true that they want to silence people complaining about the problem but they often do also go out and go and solve it you know whatever it is that's been exposed in one of these scandals that they'll they'll roll up their sleeves and go up and you know so if there are corrupt police officers it's true that they'll want to delete the youtube videos exposing the corrupt police officers but they'll also want to get out and deal with the problem which is culturally very different from us uh in the west i think here we just want to silence them want to solve the problem okay so richard is uh anticipating um the next type of conversation here richard says that he's very positive about india's democracy and the way uh okay the way that they are now finding their own way uh depending on the people rather than the alternatives all right nacho says everyone has to smash the like button that's no big deal either way all right um okay so look when i see this is now late 2021 when i see completely insane cult groups like black hammer organization openly declaring that what they want is dictatorship i say i'm glad [Laughter] i'm glad they're disambiguating the intentionally misleading message that the left wing has been playing with with socialism for so many years it's really the kind of crazy fringe communists like black hammer organization who are taking this frankly the same promises made by bernie sanders really they're made by bernie himself by other people in his camp people's room taking them and then telling you the raw naked reality of what it is they're offering or promising so what is what is black hammer organization promise they don't have a better way to provide health care they don't have a better way to generate electricity they don't have a better way to manufacture cars what they are offering is the militarization of the free market when they promise socialism what they are honest in saying is that what that promise means is that they're going to take functions in society that currently are done through whatever hybrid of free market private enterprise free individuals charging whatever fees they want to charge and some role for government regulation government guidelines and government oversight that they are going to take that stuff out of the private sector and put it into the public sector they're going to bring it under the control of a dictatorship now what that means in practice is the militarization of the whole of the economy and the whole of the society now most people who will be this honest with you about it are crazy right-wing they're some kind of libertarian uh some kind of anarcho-capitalist and i'm not as i keep telling you i'm just really being honest with what these things mean um you know okay uh this is going back many years i remember reading how old am i now okay i'm 42. i remember reading many many years ago probably more than 20 years ago about the school system in new orleans so this is the southern state of louisiana within the united states of america that the school system there was just absolutely terrible was at this absolute crisis point and the government was considering whole new directions to take on with with the school system right okay now let's just take that for granted i don't want someone in the comment section say no i was in new orleans 20 years ago and the equality of education was great for the purpose of this hypothetical you know purpose of this hypothetical discussion let's just take it for granted the quality of education in louisiana and in new orleans specifically was awful 20 years ago let's just let's just suppose that for the sake of morgan now at that stage you could have proposed you know what guys this is a crisis as really matters and we can't just have another generation of kids grow up with a terrible education someone could have proposed creating a completely socialist system of education someone could have proposed having the military take over all the schools and guys you can visit military colleges there are military colleges there are military perfectly good universities as i was saying before about the difference between being a medical doctor in the army being a medical doctor the private sector in some ways it's different and in some ways the same the could have said you know what these universities we've got are we're gonna shut them down we're gonna hand them over to the us army and the same way that there's an official navy university and there are several army colleges these are just gonna become army run colleges there are literally gonna be we're gonna fire all the professors or if they want to be hired back they've got to wear a uniform and get a salary from the military and that's it you know what the whole way we've organized these little local uh school boards that's over a local school board we're done with it it failed we are gonna we're gonna organize this in the federal government now again two things would be happening here one the teachers would probably be paid less i mean with universities that's very obvious private university in america every professor is getting over one hundred thousand dollars you can look up how much or how little military professors make i would guess fifty thousand dollars six dollars on this it's gonna be a very modest amount of money right so investors would pay less but the total budget for the institution is going to become infinite by comparison it's no longer one little county with one little school board trying to eke out the budget for its school just with the tax revenue from that tiny county within louisiana suddenly you've got the whole the coffers of the the federal government behind you anyone could have made the argument 20 years ago now anyone committed but you know what this is an emergency this is for the best let's let's militarize the education system now as i said earlier about solar power if you don't want the uniform if you don't want the odium of admitting that this is a military dictatorship you can create a new government bureau and a new uniform oh no no it's not the military it's the new um emergency state task force for improvement of education and this is their uniform you can do the same thing like just like you can create a new bureau that's just to install solar power cells you can create a new government bureau with new uniform but really structurally economically in every important way you are creating a new little military dictatorship right and they're going to follow orders they're going to get their salaries accordingly and there's gonna be absolutely no democracy unless as i already described that democracy is the kind where the outside democratic society is is bringing some um forcing some transparency they're they're invigilating and gossiping about and complaining in the newspapers about it and then the government responds to that discourse so it can be this kind of external and indirect democracy right so if we all travel back in time man time's like this is now 2021. i'm probably thinking more than 20 years ago okay we go back through 2001 and say guys we got this great idea a whole new school system we're going to try this thing called socialism i think in louisiana specifically nobody would respond pause for that maybe you got to make up a new name for it okay i can i can guarantee short term that would be an improvement like i could guarantee within like the first two years or something that would be an improvement you would sweep away all the problems but here we are in the real world in 2021 and you can see what louisiana actually did you know over those 20 years and you can see that there's actually another type of learning that really matters in leaving government democratically to tinker with and struggle with education to try new reforms to have schools being responsive to and responsible to local constituents right to try new things again and again and indeed to have competition with the free market to have competition with private schools that's the reality is that if you have money in louisiana you're sending your kid to a private school not to a public school that actually pardon me that process of open-ended and uncertain struggle has produced a better school system in louisiana today than they had 21 years ago now i am the last person to glorify either alternative right but the point is if you take that step i've had people write into me claiming that quote crowding out doesn't exist okay so the crowding out effect all right whatever innovation is possible by having the private sector and a whole bunch of little school boards struggling to provide decent education for kids whatever innovation is possible in that chaotic patchwork right that innovation disappears when you have a single centralized authority you know creating a kind of military dictatorship that governs education right and again i'm admitting with when you start at a low enough level i mean we can say this about cambodia today a lot of countries a lot of countries have a really bad education we say well look guys this doesn't work so we're going to wipe out capitalism we're going to wipe out democracy we're going to wipe out the private sector for education not for everything but just for this little area of education that's what many countries do with healthcare they they say look forget it we don't want to have a free market or private sector another this special category okay but if you do that you can guarantee there will be no innovation at all and in a very meaningful sense there will be no freedom at all now look guys i have mixed feelings about this if you live in cambodia i think this is the same thing in new orleans louisiana if you live in cambodia rich people and poor people do not go to the same schools and it's very easy to feel and i do feel wouldn't the world be a better place if the government just made these private schools for rich kids illegal and forced rich kids and poor kids to go to the same school together you know it's very easy to feel the weight now you have to drive around i mean in cambodia they're all close together so you can see there's the school for the rich kids there's the school for the poor guys you can walk i walked there i never owned a car and i never never even rented a car or anything um you know in a in a state like louisiana i think probably the distance is quite significant to go from the schools where the the poor people go and in in louisiana and new orleans there is certainly an ethnic component to this there's a there's an issue of the history of racism in the state and ongoing racial division to richard you can look at the school where the poor people go and there are no rich people there and go to this school for the rich people and there are no poor people it's very easy to look at that and say look all of this can be improved tomorrow if we just take a more muscular approach as a government a more socialist approach and say no forget it rich people are not allowed to go to a private school anymore no more private sector no more freedom no more freedom of choice no more free market competition no more competition schools will be the best school we're going to forcibly integrate this we're going to have one school system answer to one standard that is a simple answer to a complicated question right and i don't think there's anyone here who knows the american um who knows the american medical system or education system that well to answer this way but you know if you can sit down with a doctor who really understands the american health care system and if you said to them hey look what for for the sake of society as a whole for the sake of our our future for the sake of social justice we're going to completely eliminate all of the private universities teaching medicine there's going to be no more you know in the states most of the famous multi-million dollar universities these are all private institutions i just mentioned that the ivy league institutions there are some famous government universities we say okay you know what we're going to completely eliminate private education and instead all doctors are going to be educated in the military system they're all going to go to military school and they're basically the military medical system is going to swallow the private sector medical system if you said that to an older person who really knows the american health care system and who's being really candid they might say you know what you're going to do you are going to eliminate the only competent surgeons in the united states of america you are going to be replacing confidence with incompetence you are going to be eliminating the elite system education and replacing it with the worst system education there are people who can sit down and talk to you just how how much worse the quality of education and the confidence of the people is produced by the worst schools in medicine so this is a factor you can look at cambodia and say oh what a terrible thing that rich people are being educated separately from poor people but you can also look at and say at least some people are getting an education and if we eliminate this product i've been to those schools i've really i really live in cambodia really i'm living in laos too this way i love that if you eliminate those elitist schools in cambodia and then the rich do not have education any better than the poor in cambodia you know will there be a single competent surgeon produced in cambodia a single competent architect a single competent anything anyone who's competent at speaking english so this like you may be if you eliminate the private sector you may be eliminating all of the talent you've got actually and potentially for the future the harm you're doing may really be tremendous it may really be considerable so i'm just being honest with you um i don't think i don't think you know the good can wash out the bad and i don't think the bad can wash out the good you know what i mean i i do not think um either system frankly is morally justifiable i mean i think you're in a situation where you're looking at two um two very bad alternatives uh when you're talking about whenever you put it into applications when you're talking about something like education something like the medical assistant and stuff and so forth so yeah um for me that's a wrap on socialism i mean i really feel like know in the year 2022 that just one year from now i feel like we're moving towards a clearer mutual awareness of what socialism is what the threat of communism is uh you know what capitalism is not as an ideology but you know in in practice pragmatically and so on i think that countries like the united states of america are becoming more self-aware about what it is they really represent historically and presently and actually you know as opposed to being completely deluded about what the united states represents you know i mean uh and i do think just being being honest here you know um i think that within europe also uh europe is kind of too broad to generalize well in a recent video was talking about the history of neoliberalism right you know um certainly the idea of what left and right mean what socialism and capitalism mean in england are much much uh much much clearer today uh than they were under tony blair or in the immediate aftermath all right i will look at the comments for just a second so sorry uh just to be clear you had this period with tony blair you had the attempt to redefine the labor party as a hard socialist party and then in the last elections in england you had a clear rejection of that so england also is um step by step moving forward to being being as disambiguating what had formerly been tremendously ambiguous things in modern western politics okay well what am i supposed to do am i supposed to delete these comments from our most devoted troll yeah guys put years into this years of his life that he'll never get back okay so we have some comments here that are kind of the opposite of what i'm going to be talking about in the remainder of the video so they might be interested to move out for pardon me they might be interesting to read out for that um that reason so uh uh atlanta richards says culture current wealth and amount of democracy within each nation will be drastically different from ireland assuming the irish model is followed elsewhere as far as worldwide um so you'll see why i'm quoting that ah so um all right i won't get into a digression but this frida mentions the medical system in cuba i'm sorry to say that that's all propaganda once you look into it uh cuba has this system of providing free medical education for doctors but the doctors who are produced by that they know less than nurses in our system so they have they have absolutely no competence to do things like surgeries so the um the the socialist cuban medical doctor phenomenon and of them accepting students from overseas and training them to go supposedly to go back to their communities and be medical doctors with this free education they received in cuba i'm sorry to say yeah i i was also shocked i've talked to people face to face who worked with those with those doctors um so that's an interesting i mean you know now it has to be asked does that really tell you something about socialism i wouldn't even generalize in that sense i think what the cuban example shows you is the extent to which systems of education and government programs can proceed and flourish for years um with no connection whatsoever to measurable outcomes so you know to give an example you can have a school that is teaching people cinematography cinematography means filmmaking how to make films and the students don't actually learn how to make films and nobody cares so for years and years and years students pay huge amounts of money ten thousand dollars fifty thousand dollars to study cinematography and they receive a certificate at the end saying oh you know how to make films and in reality they're just sitting in a classroom where they chit chat with the professor about movies they've watched people like this people enjoy it there are teenagers who are very happy to spend money put themselves in debt or spend their parents money to get an education in so-called film and all they're learning is film appreciation and they're writing essays they watch star wars they write an essay about it they chitchat with a professor they do this for four years but there's no measurement of okay but can this kid actually use a camera can this kid actually give an example i've used talking to filmmakers i know can this kid take two people on a rooftop and film them having a fight scene a fist fight do they know how to set that up and film it and stage it safely and then edit are they actually capable of filmmaking and the answer is no so you guys have probably heard me use examples but language learning this way you have a language language learning program where supposedly people are learning chinese after four years they can't actually speak chinese so that is a very broad institutional phenomenon and um that's very just funny comment here uh anyway it's a very broad that's a very broad phenomenon and uh uh the cuban socialist medical system seems to be an extreme example of it sat 12 asks what is this black hammer organization is this an actual organization a theoretical well melissa who is sitting next to me here made a great video about it and i do like melissa's own commentary in the video but one of the most important parts of the video is just the the quotations she uses from black hammer but you know quoting from their own uh so this is a super censored video on my channel you might not be able to find it uh searching around so don't don't interrupt now don't don't stop watching the live stream now to watch it but there is melissa's video on black hammer you do a second one babe i remember maybe so communism in america colin blackham okay right so that's the one that has the clips from the um the skype calls okay good yeah yeah that's that's the one thing yeah anyway that's this great video melissa made and i i'm sorry to see well i'm sorry to say it's important but in some ways you know i'm i'm happy this is happening i'm sorry if i drifted off of war but i think disambiguation is an important uh concept a lot of the beliefs that had been ambiguous before on the left are becoming unambiguous all right so return to the question that i read at the very start of this live stream hannibal wrote in through patreon he says hi isil i'm interested in learning more about why some nations succeed and others fail he says he's read this horrible book guns germs and steel and another book that i haven't heard of called why nations fail the second one i've heard i do know about guns german steel all right and he said he's halfway through an economics 101 uh textbook by gregory menkeu who i don't know he says quote i want to learn more about this and i was wondering if you could offer some guidance to be more specific i am indian and i'm very interested in learning why my country is such a wreck as opposed to japan or us which are incredibly well developed nations okay so guys um all right so there's a good comment here i want to reply all right so that's that's the question i'm going to apply you in just one second after i reply to this thing that's just been said by william again uh so william says school choice for everyone would let inferior and dangerous public schools in the united states disappear so william i don't know how old you are i know you know there's more to it you know there's more to it right so we're going through this right now with attempts to reform uh health insurance in the united states of america right so do you have multiple health care systems but the richest people and the healthiest people opt into one health care system one system of health insurance leaving behind the poorest people and the most disabled people and the sickest people you see the problem here so then all the people with money are paying into the system that needs at least and the system that needs the most money has the most dependent non-productive people are in a separate system right you say school choice for everyone would let me furious and dangerous you say school choice would let inferior public schools disappear wrong the problem is to be more polarizing the problem is that when you have school choice then the richest students and the most evil students they have a choice and they go up to the best schools and guess who's left behind the people who don't have a choice so you increasingly have a system which the poorest least resource schools actually need the most resources they're helping the students who need the help the most now now that's partly just because of mental disability some people are dyslexic some people are artistic so but there are other factors too i mean students who are poor students who have parents who can't educate them outside of the classroom need more help with education but the the biggest one of all of course is not poverty it's multiculturalism the problem is you have so many students who are in the poor school system who speak english as their second language or their third language they have a special challenge they need more help they need more education just to reach levels of fluency in english reading and writing ability right you need smaller classrooms more teachers more effort more resources there so william again you may you may know this and you're just nothing i don't i don't judge you by a one sentence comment on you i don't think oh this is this is who you are you know i understand it's a casual it's a casual comment the most important pattern to remember about the free market when you're contracting the free market to government services and we can gloss government services as socialism and we can gloss government services as military dictatorship as i've been saying but when you talk about the free market then you're talking about a more unequal distribution of resources and choices all right when the free market is left to operate there are going to be a hundred or a thousand different companies in downtown new york competing to provide you with plumbing if you have a leak in your faucet you can phone five different plumbers and find out how much it'll cost to fix the leap leak and there are all these different companies competing to do plumbing jobs in downtown new york but guess what that's the locus of the greatest economic activity how many schools are there private sector schools competing in downtown new york right okay now look at saskatchewan now look at kansas now now look at cambodia now look at new orleans you know what i mean the clustering effect and the exacerbation of inequality and that in some places there are too many choices so just new york los angeles chicago you'll have a ton of schools and a ton of plumbers if it's private sector right and then in other places there's only one choice or there's no choice at all mr but get real you talk about school choice do you have any idea how many towns have one school there there is no choice like if you if there's one school either it's run by the government or it's run by a private corporation or private charity like either it's both so like coast to coast across america across europe even within england i've been in towns in england where there's one school they're not gonna have ten schools for parent's troops not reality right now sorry beyond that you know there are a lot of other conflating variables here like religion when you go to a town in england that has two schools you know why one's catholic there's a catholic school and there's the non-catholic this is the reality right you know sometimes by the way this there's an anglican school there's a protestant school you know with their religious division street schools okay so now you have a quote-unquote choice how do you like your choice do you want to put your kid into a catholic school a partisan school or a secular school right and guess who's in the secular government school right again you're going to get disproportionate some burdens are going to be disproportionately in the public system so no school choice for everyone it it doesn't solve the problem you name here right the specific problem you name that inferior and dangerous schools would disappear no you know how bad teachers disappear because you fire them you know how bad hospitals improve because you show up and you shut them down you demand they reach higher standards you need really coercive really active roles from government going into schools and evaluating them and holding to a higher standard right you need a really coercive royal government going into hospitals and raising the higher standard and guess what that's the way the military works too all right there's no way free choice is going to be standards in the military you have people breathing down your neck you have superior officers you have people demanding excellence and showing up and evaluating what's wrong when you're not achieving excellence right that's how that's how the school system works is how the healthcare system works that's how all these things were and it's it's tragedy i mean it's there's this wonderful dream that right-wingers you know um right-wingers want to rely on there's this wonderful beautiful dream that you can just let let people have freedom of choice you just let the free market operate blindly and it's going to result in higher standards for everyone and it's it's not true in any um any sector of the economy in any example like this so all right well this guy he is willing to create a new account every five minutes to come in and join the well i guess we've learned he doesn't work mondays i don't think today's a holiday in canada oh there you go let me tell you something guys you may think we have a lot of uh a lot of free speech here in canada but we don't um the the harassing communications act is is it's remarkable how little freedom of speech you have what this guy is doing actually is a crime in canada and he actually can go to jail for two years for it so i can i can provide the link let's say yeah a term in prison of not more than two years so there you go so if fandor wants to look it up um that's the reality all right okay so okay i want to get back to this question from from patreon all right um right so atl richard says stages of analysis is lost to most of us right sorry i often talk about full life cycle analysis so don't just think of a single stage think about as a knowledge and i was saying that before in the critique of socialism now i'm in effect doing a critique of the private sector uh the private sector option right so anonymous 101 said oh wait so m roland says like internet providers and electricity exactly so if you have free market competition for internet provision you have 10 different options in new york you have 10 different options in los angeles competing but then a huge part of the united states of america there's one or zero sometimes there's zero but most places there's one okay you have comcast or nothing you have no no effects of uh you have no effects of a free market competition okay um anonymous 101 says quote why would people choose a worse option in a free market question mark there would be competition that would beat out the worst business so another one one i am not saying this to insult you in any way but i'd like to ask how old you are okay i'd like to ask how old you are all right why don't you go to a poor black neighborhood in louisiana where there's one school and why don't you ask the parents of the children at this there are schools there where a hundred percent of the children are black there's a predominant let's say it's 80 black but a predominantly black predominantly poor school in louisiana and ask them ask the parents why don't you just choose a better school for your children what part of this don't you get like some people have no choice like that's that's what we're talking about here some people have no choice some people have very few choices some people have a choice where all of them are bad you can live in a part of the city where there are three schools all of them are bad you know you can talk to parents their kids went to three different schools well they went to this school you know the gym teacher was a jerk he had a conflict with the gym teacher so then we tried this school and it was just as bad but he didn't have the conflict with the gym teacher and somebody told us this other school was better but we tried it was no you know now okay now why don't you look at that from the investor's perspective all right i don't know if you know this about capitalism it relies on this thing called investment do you think there's a multi-millionaire strolling through that same neighborhood in louisiana and thinking you know what i could make a lot of money offering these people a better educational alternative at a profit oh you think there's money in poverty do you is that now there may be like let's be real there may be investors walking around the neighborhood saying hey you know what i can open a pizza restaurant here there are all kinds of businesses that flourish in poor neighborhoods you know poor neighborhoods they still buy things they still have economic activity but you know what do you think someone's going to show up and say you know what i'm going to spend the next 20 years of my life bringing a really excellent standard of education to this poor black neighborhood in louisiana and there are exceptions and the exceptions are religious maniacs right i like you think it would be any problem you could go to saudi arabia and do the fundraising today and you could say hey you know what there's this poor black neighborhood in the american south and i think if we set up a school here we can convert people to islam by offering them a better alternative education you'll get money yo that's what happens with religion i've seen that going on with buddhism there are buddhist educations there are people who will be committed they'll be committed because they're religious fanatics by the way including mainstream christians you know protestant and catholic who will say hey they are going to put the next 20 years of their life into operating a school in this poor black neighborhood and they're doing it independently of the government to whatever combination of donations would have because again private sector doesn't necessarily mean for-profit you could be you can be non-government you can be a private sector or entity that mostly is relying on donations or what have you you know but whether they're catholic or the pro there are there are religious fanatics and obviously i do not support this model of education either so i'm sorry but you know the guy who said this um quote why would people choose a worse option in a free market and louisiana is not the most extreme example i can talk to you about cambodia i can talk to you about laos we can talk all over the world you know or whatever you know when you get in an ambulance and say i've been shot take me take me you know take me to be patched up by a surgeon what what do you think you think you get out get out a book of pros and cons and say well you know let's look at what's a good hospital i can go to let's look at the which one charges a good price or something you know you go to the nearest hospital when i was doing healthcare sector research in cambodia so all the research showed and the other researchers with me they said look it's the same in every country in the world people go to the nearest dentist like 90 of the time unless they have a problem with the nearest dentist they know it's a bad dentist they go to the nearest dentist they go to the nearest doctor they go to the nearest hospital there is no evaluation there is no free choice even when there are other choices like oh i could drive for another 30 minutes and get to another hospital if it's only 30 minutes people don't don't live that way you know so to me it's a hilarious question why would people choose a worse auction a free market what choice what are you talking about and who provides the choice investors provide those choices only when there can be a profit made and again the fact that you can run a business that makes a profit as a plumbing company in manhattan new york city doesn't mean that you could run that same business at a profit on a remote small island a small community with only a few hundred people it doesn't mean you can run that business at a profit even in louisiana right so and plumbing is relatively simple compared to uh education and it's years and years of your life if you are the millionaire investor who's gonna run this school all right you gotta have love i thought about this guys i thought about opening and running a school in laos or cambodia my old stomping ground i was involved in education there and esl and things we thought about opening an english school in in taiwan and stuff you know so it's a lot of love it's a lot of uh a lot of stuff too a lot of stuff surfaced okay so cool so look an honest one i'm not trying to beat up on you but i'm just i'm just illustrating this so he he wrote back and said that he's 23 years old so look dude i'm not hating on you but sure in the in the real world you've got a lot to learn about these things and some of these things you don't get out of an economics textbook okay so some great questions but i've gotta answer the question i've already got coming from um coming from patreon okay all right so there are a lot of fascinating topics here i could digress into into uh uh talking about um okay so i'll deal with this quickly it's possible i've done youtube videos talking about this before talking about reform education so william mcginn says school vouchers for everyone to to let them go where they want some schools are violent and you need armed police at the front door philadelphia is a prime example okay so william um why doesn't the free market handle the sewage treatment system why does the government have to build pipes connecting your house to a sewage treatment system why can't the government just give you a voucher and say hey you have sewage you take care of it why doesn't the government just hand out one million vouchers to one million people and say look the government doesn't want to spend time and money and effort on this anymore everybody solved their own sewage problem here's a voucher okay william what about roads if you own a car build roads what's your problem what's the matter bro don't you know private sector companies they make concrete they make cement they meant they make tar macadam everything you need to build a road you can get on the free market so why doesn't the government say look forget it we're not fixing potholes anymore we're not putting up stop signs or traffic lights if you people want roads we're going to give you vouchers like we're going to charge lower taxes we're going to i'm going to hand out vouchers so if you own a car if you want roads if you think that's in your interest that's on you that's up to you to provide to everybody why do you think that is [Laughter] all right now the reality is right wingers are not this naive they're not this stupid they pretend to be because of racism um the whole argument for school vouchers in the united states of america it was created in order to resist and oppose racial integration of schools of having black people and white people in in the same schools so no i'm sorry but the school vouchers argument is laughably stupid now uh tell me some swim okay so we have we have uh remote poverty-stricken first nations people here so the cree the ojibwe in the united states let's say the navajo okay so you get the navajo living out in the middle of the desert oh some communities a few hundred people you know oh oh you guys want a school oh here are some vouchers what are you gonna do you're living in a community of 300 people in the middle of the desert you're a navajo tribe member how are you going to how are you going to prove education for your children with this voucher really well and what's the quality of that education you'd be oh okay and you know william you know um even in a big city where there are a lot of options oh you know in paris france they got a lot of muslim fundamentalists what do you think the the effect is going to be if all the children whose parents are muslim fundamentals you just give them a vote and say look you take care of your own kids you decide what's best for your kids it's up to you you make your own rational choices now are you kidding me obviously it's not just muslims whether it's muslims or buddhists or i mean some parents are just stupid too some parents aren't a member of a religion they're just idiots they're not capable of making good decisions for their children the same way they're not capable of making good decisions about sewage treatment plants or building roads any one of these things let alone all of them at the same time right you know what people actually can't do for themselves what government does to them and i'm sorry but how can anyone be so blind education does not operate at a profit like if you look at the sector as a whole it's a money-losing endeavor it's a money-losing phenomenon right you know if you want to provide maybe there's someone in science right now who really wants to provide world-class education for the cree people for the ojibwe people for the navajo indians i'm saying this because they're examples of poor people in rural areas but there were white people there were white people living in remote poor poverty certain areas too we were talking about black people in in louisiana there may be some people in this audience right now who actually have some kind of humanitarian motivation to do that none of you none of you would think about doing it at a profit none of you would say that you are going to get rich offering education to the poorest and most disadvantaged people in the world all right and and the voucher thing i mean that that is a bad joke that is a footnote at the end of america's long history of slavery racism and quote-unquote integration um the integration of what had formerly been desegregation the desegregation of the school system so william again i'm sorry i'm sorry if you feel insulted i know i have to perform this is a performance to some extent but i don't assume you're you're a terrible person i just assume you've been misled by you know the propaganda that you know genuinely a lot of a lot of right-wing libertarian groups do spread around that somehow um school vouchers will solve the problem all that school vouchers will do is put more power into the hands of the church whether it's the christian church or a muslim fundamentalist or what have you and there are actually examples in the us where that was why they reversed the policy where they started moving towards school voter system and then they were horrified to see that this what this led to specifically in terms of islam within the united states i haven't read i'm just being honest i haven't read of any accounts in the united states where they were getting real concerned about mormonism or forms of christianity they should though you know they they should be concerned about those things too but the particular right-wing legislators suddenly realized oh whoa if we remove government from this part of the economy uh guess who guess who takes over guess who really benefits from it and as i say you know this idea of choice on the free market it presumes that there is something there already for you to choose between but that's already been produced for you to choose between like you can go to the grocery store and choose between buying bananas and buying strawberries because they've already been created and you know this is uh this is not the reality of how education works it's also not the reality of how sewage treatment works or how building roads works you can't you don't get up in the morning start your car and think why would i choose to drive on this road rather than rather than another road built by another company uh to it to a different standard or something so yeah um okay so return to the question sent in from hannibal on patreon at long last uh okay part of what i do on youtube is philosophical i was walking through a graveyard the other day and i wondered to myself if i were to choose the words that were to appear on my own tombstone would i include something about philosophy or being a philosopher the main thing i do philosophically in these discussions is to help people to visualize a problem very often it's more important than any particular solution so i give numerous examples of this when it's coming my channel very often face to face the way i have won arguments is precisely by helping the other person visualize clearly what it was they'd been misapprehending before and why it was they were thus disagreeing with me or fighting with me so you know i'd say one of the simplest examples here i i've currently basically nobody has argued this point with me was that um there were many vegans who were exaggerating the numbers of people participating in uh vegan protests vegan rallies what we call vegan workshops vegan vegan festivals festivals good work and they'd claim 50 000 people were at this festival now the most important i know this may not seem that philosophical but really it is the most important counter argument i have to pose is okay here's a photograph of a stadium with just 5 000 people sitting in it this is what 5 000 people look like sitting at a rock concert here's a photograph of 10 000 people that's what a crowd ten thousand people looks like here's a crowd of fifty thousand people you know like you're making these claims and you're not actually visualizing what they would mean in practice so you're making yourself susceptible to a completely abstract line of reasoning which isn't so much debunked by visualizing it correctly but if we visualize it correctly we're going to ask different questions leading to very different um conclusions this is an easy example it may not seem to you that this is tremendously philosophical but you'll see now that it becomes philosophical right away um one of the ideologies that unfortunately bernie sanders made much more popular in the united states of america is called mmt mmt is modern monetary theory and um this is basically the theory that the government has unlimited amounts of money now if you just read the newspapers it it seems believable in an abstract way so just recently we heard that joe biden is going to spend one trillion dollars on new infrastructure we've heard numbers in the billions and trillions being announced and it seems that the government never goes bankrupt it seems the government never runs out of money and there are some people in the newspapers warning that the government will go bankrupt and randomly but you know we all seem to live with a certain level of kind of public discourse that seems to encourage us this belief that the government's wealth is is infinite now in terms of visualizing that i'm going to just give an example here that i'll make some more use of later in answering hannibal's question how many people do in the audience are now we have 36 people in the audience okay so let's say we gather together 36 people plus me and melissa and uh let's say we bring a doctor and a nurse because we mentioned that earlier okay let's say us right now about 40 people in total in the year 2021 we pack our bags we get our tents ready and we move to a small island so this is not a desert island scenario this is not that our airplane has crashed we decide that we're sick and tired of just chatting about politics on youtube and we're going to go start a new life farming on this remote island so you pack whatever you want you bring your laptop computer i'm just saying you have all the all the modern conveniences you can carry and you go to this island and you start a new life and we have axes and hatchets and shovels and whatever you know this kind of thing um okay so as soon as we're there and we start living this life our daily reality is shaped by scarcity right so a lot of people here are vegan as soon as you start surviving on this island we would have no choice but to start eating fish you're on this island and about the only resource you've got there's fish maybe there are some seagulls if you want to eat seagulls or seagull eggs and of course we haven't farmed anything yet we haven't planted anything melissa's laughing and i wonder why yeah i don't know it's something i've had to something about to research you have to uh oh well freda freedom mentions coconut you get sick of the coconuts real quick let me tell you um anyway you know when you first arrive you haven't planted anything yet you haven't farmed anything yet you start scratching at the ground and planting things and gathering things in the forest you start cutting down trees there's only a certain amount of wood there's a certain amount of rainfall rainfall is your only source of drinking water and so on you know you start farming you start struggling to survive right now this theory popularized by bernie sanders about mmt what if somebody shows up the 41st person shows up in the island and says hey guys don't worry i've got the solution all we have to do is distribute this currency and as long as we have a government printing and distributing currency the amount of currency in circulation is is infinite it's unlimited so all our problems are solved you know now this is a visualization exercise right there is a sense in which this madman the 41st person on island there's a sense in which what they're saying is true we can use an unlimited number of tokens an unlimited number of pieces of paper to represent the transactions in our society we can use an unlimited amount of currency to represent the things that are being produced and exchanged right but that doesn't increase or improve the actual things being exchanged that doesn't change our actual situation yeah so right away just in bringing down that level where now we're thinking about 40 people on one island maybe the only things the island can produce are coconuts fish lumber to a limited extent you know whatever we farm is going to take time to grow maybe three months maybe a year you know this is the reality of where we're at on the salad now i just want to say a couple more words about scarcity which again it's not obvious in a mass society we talk about a mass society of millions of people and billions of dollars that myth about mmt starts to seem believable oh we can just keep we can keep spending billions of dollars on nasa and billions of dollars in the olympics while at the same time reducing taxes and it'll never be a problem you know it's just that we've taken too many steps away from the type of economy that we really can visualize on a human scale ourselves now of course people who have practice if you have many years of experience in economic of course things become easier to visually once you have experience with what a million dollars is really like you know it's not it gets less let's mysterious with with uh with time and practice so there you go lots of lots of comments from the audience nacho says dude i'm so ready let's buy a island you don't need to buy come on they're giving them away there are plenty of empty islands even even here west coast of canada you don't need to buy nothing man u.s and canada lots of empty lines you don't even have to go to a third world country i'm telling you okay all right so look i just want to say this a little bit more i'm going to reply i i am replying to this question from patreon believe it or not okay my point is ultimately most of us living in the modern world what we have the most trouble visualizing is scarcity we can visualize wealth we know what money means we know what would mean we can visualize having a car having a fancy car right but really understanding what scarcity means has become strange to us it's become difficult you know to think from the ground up about what scarce this one means so on this island so everybody in this audience all 40 of us and so i'm 40 and remember including one doctor and one nurse um they may become a problem later on they'll say um all 40 of us are highly intelligent highly disciplined highly ethical people right why because you're you're having this conversation right we have honestly all 40 of us we probably would do okay on and out okay i've mentioned you that i have a mentally disabled brother severely mentalism what if he moves down okay now on this island so far as i've described it there really is no money there's no point we all know each other we're all busy like you know think about the process you're going to cut wood you're going to build a hut you know when you have time you're going to improve the hut right okay now my brother shows up and joins us right and i'm just gonna say oh hey guys um you look you know we're all gonna take care of my my mentally brother it's an imposition on everyone right and if you have no money there's no simple way to measure it's not gonna say oh well that's gonna cost us so much money so this is somebody with a mouth to feed you you have to it is a mouth to feed you know with a certain amount of food a certain amount of labor certain amount of time and this person is gonna contribute nothing my own brother as i mentioned he's never spoken a sentence in any language he can't talk he can't work he can't do nothing he just eats and goes to the bathroom etc and makes disturbing noises he's severely severely mentally handicapped okay and he needs somebody to take care of one thing this person is a 100 imposition cost on our resources and they produce and contribute nothing okay can we cope with it are you guys all motivated to take care of my mentally handicapped brother okay we got 40 people only okay what happens if one of you has a kid so somebody frida frida and nacho get pregnant okay you could have a mentally disabled kid are we capable of taking care of and raising for the next 20 years or something mentally disabled kids someone who has a mouthfeed and again at this point there's no money there's no way to measure it in a mass society when you have a society with millions and billions of people right it becomes so easy to write these things off it comes what where's my mentally disabled brother right now he's being taken care of by the government of canada the taxpayers my own taxes in theory you know all of us in the society are paying taxes so that my father and his ex-wife didn't have to raise that kid he's lived his whole life in mental institutions what do you want to say being cared for by professional nurses his whole life he still is now right he's being fed and clothed and taken to the bathroom and showered and having his bum wipe for him by professionals who went to university to learn how to do that it's unbelievably expensive on our island with 40 people there's no way there's no way we can do that now i mentioned before the doctor and the nurse they may also start to say look the doctor says hey he went to school for 15 years to become a doctor the nurse went to school for 10 years become a nurse they say look you guys you can't really pay us salary we understand you're doing this utopian commune here but if you can't pay us to stay and take care of you and contribute in this way we gotta go because we could be earning a hundred thousand dollars or more working at a working at a normal hospital back in normal society right okay so again i am so nacho says we can take turns right right but it's a huge imposition on everyone i agree i know that's how it is i know that's how it is but it's a huge imposition you didn't think it was going to get this dark melissa but i mean this is this is you know i mean what is scarcity and then you know what is the brutality of an ancient society so you guys know even rome ancient rome they engaged in overt uh uh fantasize you know yeah actually what i thought of talking about the person who would come to the island and introduce mmt this currency right well what would be the currency it wouldn't be paper you know coming up i don't know what would it be and just that simple thing alone order it from amazon [Laughter] um okay so i i have a lot to say about this the question again it's problematizing the poverty of india as if it's something extraordinary all right as if india by default should be a wealthy powerful country the same way japan is or the same way america is right and instead really what you need to do is understand scarcity and kind of problematize wealth understand where wealth arises from to quote you know the title of adam smith's book you have to understand the origin of the wealth of nations now just say that type of primitive society i've described the 40 of us all living on an island and we're all vegan but we're forced to eat fish to survive terrible we don't sit there complaining about the cholesterol gee you know back when i lived in civilization i was vegan and now i've got to eat clams and cockles and what is this and we're reduced to the brutality of being pescetarian by living on this remote island because we can't farm for crap and again farms take years to get going the fastest turnaround in my opinion is the papaya plant but i digress papaya it's amazing in the tropics you can plant it in just a couple weeks later it's producing fruit for it anyway um you know i've looked at because of the life i've lived i've looked at not just the history but also the archaeology of numerous primitive and ancient societies around the world where you can see how they operate so i remember looking at the archaeology of ancient traditional societies in northern scotland and what you saw there is this up to a certain point those societies just exist in the small clusters we're describing here 40 people living in a cluster and there's a sense in which they have neither wealth nor poverty right you have so few people living on this point on the coast of scotland it could be an island it doesn't matter it doesn't matter if it's an island or just a part of the rocky coast up there there are so few people that there's unlimited wood and unlimited fish and unlimited drinking water relative to the population you have so few people that you're not running out of resources there's a sense in which there's abundance and plenty right but there's also a sense in which you're in a state of absolute scarcity absolute privation you have to make everything with your own hands the clothes you wear are the clothes you make you know what i mean this is really you know primitive travis said right but you know i know this may sound a hashtag not vegan but you know you will never run out of fish and you'll never run out of wood okay what changes is that at some point in history the furthest horizon of the free market moves at some point instead of killing fish for your own family to eat you're killing as many fish as possible drying them in the sun putting them on a wooden cart and sending them down the road and that road goes on and on and on and it may be like ancient uh you know in the era of bath england being outpost of the roman empire it may be it goes down the road from scotland all the way to bath and it's feeding the roman empire you're feminine you're feeding legionaries of the roman empire with with dried uh salt fish you know produce you know you fish them and dry them in the sun it becomes a durable commodity this way in an era before uh refrigerators now everything changes now suddenly all the things in your community that didn't have a price before have a price tag on them and all the things that were not scarce before are scarce now it's possible to kill the fish to the point of extinction now the number of you're killing as many fish as you possibly can every day and now also you don't just have to wear the clothes in your own back the fish have a price you're selling them you're getting paid for them you can buy clothing that's made by a person much more skilled than you it's made in a factory somewhere to some extent made by a craftsman or a loom or what have you right so you know this too in our island with 40 people the doctor and the nurse say if we don't pay them they're gonna run away they're gonna go live in the big city they're gonna go move to los angeles where they can earn a hundred thousand dollars a year doing the same job and we say okay well what can we do to pay our doctor and a nurse we have fish we have trees maybe we can farm papaya now suddenly we have to take these things and we have to put them on a boat and take them to the mainland and sell them and we have to generate enough money to pay for the doctor and so on right small societies like this really exist one of my former professors at university of victoria was a specialist in remote islands of polynesia and oceania so i did with him study and read about some of those societies where you know the whole thing is at a small enough scale that you understand how real the scarcity is one of these nouns i'm not even going to attempt to name them from memory because i'll get their names wrong but i remember they were bankrupting themselves by just maintaining an army of 10 soldiers the king decided that he wanted to have 10 men with guns around him all the time and formerly they hadn't had any at all like i don't think there was no army and now they had 10 guys and this alone was like you know there was just no economy to support it you know what i mean um there was another island i remember when there were there were race riots in two of the ethnic groups and they burned down a large part of the the only city and you know what i'm reading about this the article is written like more than 10 years later it's like nothing nothing's being rebuilt like that was it like the economy here is fragile enough you know you have a certain number of trees producing coconuts you have a certain amount of money being generated by fish but like if you burn down a bunch of buildings in the city there is no money there's no investment there are no materials you have to ship images we're like there's like damage done to the economy is much more permanent and long-lasting than it would be in a more in a more massive society and like the ability of those societies to keep one doctor on the island and to have the materials used to really provide you know to provide medicine to provide education and so on it's it's unbelievably limited okay so you know my point is here to say at the most primitive and small scale uh society emerges out of a context of total privation and total scarcity and to some extent in that situation the distinction between wealth and poverty doesn't exist right but if someone has a mentally disabled child they're incapable of taking care of it right like this is part of the tragedy of the ancient world infanticide is talked about even in the ancient buddhist texts where people are opposed to well there's bad karma from killing anything even killing a mosquito and people have to kill their own children and it's horrifying that's terrifying so you know there's a sense in which you can try to make this out to be a utopia because there's no money there's no measurement of the difference between between rich and poor but the scarcity is absolute right now you know if you're asking the question i'm sorry i'm sorry i'm laughing but from my perspective it's it's ridiculous if you ask the question uh why is india not a tremendously wealthy and powerful place in the way that japan and the united states are to me this reflects i'm not i'm not saying this to insult you hannibal this reminds me so much of the left-wing mentality that regards abundance and wealth and plenty as the birthright of humanity right so i hear that from the left i hear that word birthright all the time from the far left wing from black hammer the left wing group we talked about you know but across the board i hear this all the time the idea of a birthright you're born to this so you're entitled to have it and that's it there's there should be no there should be no question of of scarcity uh that mankind's birthright is just to have this kind of limited abundance and then what the far left does is they look at the situation and they say well if there isn't wealth and luxury and power if people don't have a wonderful life if they don't have the kind of abundance and leisure that they're supposedly born to have then there must be a conspiracy then it must be that so-called capitalism has somehow deprived people of the wealth and leisure that they're entitled to by default just as their birth so i hope you see why i took so much time to talk through what really is our birthright what we really are entitled to by default and that is a very hard scrabble existence an existence where there's neither wealth or poverty but where we face absolute scarcity absolute privatization all the time where our options in life are are incredibly limited now to be fair and i i do i'm not i'm not just doing this to be a contributor list i think it's really significant to point out that many people in the right wing indulge in the same type of fantasy where what they want to justify is deregulating the market having an unregulated free market and they justify this by claiming that again our natural birthright is just for everyone to have wealth and plenty and opportunity like you know you work hard but you're paid well like that's just the default state of nature on planet earth and then if there ever is poverty if there ever is a problem if the system doesn't work as it's supposed to that then they will they will attribute this to a kind of conspiracy the other way where they will blame government regulation they will blame socialism they will say well if only the free market were left to its own devices we would all have this abundance we're supposedly born into and entitled to so um you know there is nothing mysterious about poverty um there is nothing mysterious about why india would be mired in poverty forever and you know this comes back to the the final reason why i introduced this image of a soul living on an island so the 40 of oh now we have 41. someone's got to get kicked off the island we used to be all good it's down to 40. all right sorry sorry the 40 of us the 40 people in this in this audience um let's say we go to the island and let's say we make progress from pescetarian to veganism so at first we have to kill all these fish to survive but we work hard we start planting crops we're tilling the soil we're planting fruit and cutting up green vegetables we plant rice i don't know yeah rice there you go we become rice farmers and after a few years the economy is rolling and we have enough we have enough to survive we have enough wood we have enough rain water that we're gathering i'm presuming this island does not have any kind of spring producing potable water right so we're just gathering rainwater very limited water resources um very limited wood very limited food what happens if the population doubles what happens if the population quadruples what happens if the population increases by ten to one right so i mean this is the side of economics nobody really wants to talk about anymore i mean marxist try to make everything about labor as if the reality is well i can quote mao zedong on this mao zedong refused to deal with overpopulation in china um by inventing the colorful uh turn of phrase that for every one mouth there are two hands uh i think i think it's a little bit for every one mouth that needs to eat there are two hands that need to work something like this like like by definition all human beings are just going to be so productive with their labor that will never have scarcity well population of afghanistan doubled under american occupation by the way 19 19 um 19 years their population approximately uh doubled so we we live in a world in a situation of absolute scarcity we live in a world where the value of what we produce is only measured relative to the market on the horizon we can export it to so give an example i mean this one would take some research for you guys to relate to um i'm not saying this to insult you but it's hard for people to imagine this you know the first phase of the expansion of the japanese empire is all about sugar it's all about planting sugar and growing sugar and selling sugar right every single one of those sugar fields is now shut down it's no longer it's no longer profitable it's no longer productive right now you know times change the world has changed to an unbelievable extent what did japan do as soon as they conquered taiwan i should put concord in quotation marks wasn't really a conquest but whatever uh japan expanded its empire to include taiwan sugar sugarcane that was going to be the that was the big crop that was the most important economic priority they built they built new railroads in order to access the sugar crops now today can you imagine sugar like taiwan isn't a huge amount of area anyway can you imagine a few little sugar fields a few little fields of this crop producing enough money to pay for building a railroad even over 50 years in installments it will never happen it's worthless it's worth pennies you know sure the idea that sugar would be massively profitable and it was for a time right and the japanese had access to a market where they could export that sure sell that sure it doesn't matter what's exporting or not where that sugar was really worth enough money to pay for building a railroad now you can look at india today what do you think you think history can repeat itself you think india can get rich farming sugar no do you think haiti can get rich farming sugar no heaty can lock itself into perpetual poverty vermin sugar you know haiti was poor uh 300 years ago farming sugar they're they're still poor now uh farming sugar you know so um [Music] you know i know i mean sorry my first point on this really is my last point i think the problem with these questions in economics and political philosophy it's a problem of visualization uh and also of course it's partly a problem of attitude and it's a problem of feeling entitled it is completely ridiculous for the people of india to look at the united states of america or look at japan and say we're entitled to this is our birthright no you're not none of us are i mean it's completely ridiculous for the people of india to to think that the default mode of life on earth is what exists in the wealthiest countries on the earth and to think that they can achieve it you know without without making sacrifices you know now i think everyone in this audience knows i don't think i'm gonna have to lean on you to to prove i don't think you're gonna be terribly um skeptical about this the level of wealth that china has today china went from being one of the poorest countries in the world i just mentioned that the nadir of mao zedong's communism in china china was poorer than mongolia which was devastating to the chinese ego they got down to an incredibly low level of poverty right and they have become moderately affluent you know there still are poor people in china but they have they have made tremendous economic progress during a period in which they had a one-child policy do you think that's unrelated you know economic decisions involve sacrifice within a closed system of having finite resources um whether you're thinking about a tiny island or you know a province like saskatchewan in canada where i was in saskatchewan basically all the government revenue all the tax money the government had came from a pot ash mine at a very productive potash mine there were a few other mining projects within the province i mean it might as well be a small island alexa what's the population of saskatchewan in 2020 the population of saskatchewan was 1.17 million people so just over 1 million people okay guys 1.1 million people it's tiny and in terms of population study in terms of land it's enormous so you have tax revenue coming in from just a few industries like this you have a pot ash mine you have a few a few projects like this right and then with that revenue you've got to provide all these social services for your population you've got to provide hospitals and education and roads and plumbing and electricity you know you have to you have to accomplish all these amazing things with the the money generated from just a few of these uh uh a few of these these these opportunities and it's a tremendous challenge now when i talk about making sacrifice that you're gonna do some things and not others i don't just mean population that's the old theory called malthusianism or malthusianism of putting all the emphasis on population you know what you have to make tough choices whether you think of the tiny island society a medium-sized society like saskatchewan or or china okay so saskatchewan has a certain amount of money being generated yeah okay there's a little bit from farming farming's network potash mining a few mines uh in terms of industries we had an oil refinery we didn't have oil but we had an oil refinery so there's a little bit of money generated from that a few little projects down there right okay um used to have uranium mines right in the north i think they're all still a little bit of iranian money um you want to go to the olympics this year guys out of that money i mean again how how many people you get do you want the population to double do you want the population to sit your populations they have if you have only so many resources and where you acknowledge the extent to which your costs and your tax revenue ultimately do rest on resources you know okay so do you want to go to the olympics this year how many men do you want to have in space how many people should be on the international space station how many space shuttles do you want to put into space right he said these are real questions with real consequences of the resources we have in our in our economy and in our ecology again this is very easy to visualize on the small island maybe harder with saskatchewan maybe harder with china how much of our time and money and land and water is gonna go into cows you guys already know i'm i'm vegan but you know it really is there's a finite amount of resources in the system and you're choosing to put it into the cows it's a finite amount of resource and systems you choose to put in dogs too you know what are they talking about dogs or sheep or cows you know some of the most significant decisions governments can make is what we're not going to do there was a visionary decision made by the government of singapore singapore is a small island much bigger population alexa what's the population of singapore in 2020 the population of singapore was 5.76 million people 5.76 million um you know singapore one of the most important decisions the government ever made was to kick out the car industry they decided they were not going to manufacture vehicles anymore so you know around the world all kinds of governments recording and pursuing you know vehicle manufacturing but they they they did the research they did the math and they said well we have only so much space we have only so much pollution we can tolerate like you know they're not even like against pollution like the government it's not like they're crusaders for ecology they're really not like okay like within this much area how much air pollution how much water pollution how much resource use can we tolerate and the reality is it was they made the decision just at the right time they're like well the reality is what we're going to go into here what's what the real future on this island is circuit board manufacturing and they talk about it less there's also guns munition manufacturing so there's some high-tech high-end manufacturing business they say you know what the best thing we can do for the car industry is get rid of it you guys plenty of space in malaysia indonesia go somewhere else go to china we don't care get out kick out the the car you know um to my knowledge you know sweden made a different decision where they decided to kick out small car manufacturing and focus on big uh big heavy truck manufacturing it's a little bit different and sweden is not a small island it was a question of how to compete and so on but you know the decision in singapore that we're not gonna do uh automotive manufacturing so you know um this is my point we could ask the question simply how much more poverty-stricken would china be today if their population had doubled again instead of having the one-child policy in the period in which they did have a bunch of policy how much wealthier could india be today if they did have a one-child policy during the same period of time when china had a one-child policy now i'm not a maltousian i don't use this as the only um you know example i don't think this is the the one and only example that matters but the point is that ultimately governments have to make very tough decisions about what it is they are going to do and what it is they are not going to do and the difference between the wealth of different kinds of nations ultimately arises not from the free market left to its own devices but to the long-term implant pardon me the long-term impacts and implications of those decisions whether they're made badly or whether they're made well whether they're made democratically or whether they are made despotically